Four days in Riga, and the country starts an hour away.
What the Old Town walk costs, which bog boardwalk is worth a 4am start, and whether the palace is better than the coast when you only have one day spare.
Riga gives you three of these. The fourth is worth the drive.
A morning on foot, an hour on the canal, lunch in the market hangars, and one long day south.
01Morning one in RigaRiga Old Town walking tourCobbles, guild houses and the cathedral square, before the cruise groups land. The cheapest way to make sense of the place.
02An hour on the waterRiga Sightseeing Tour by Canal Boat with AudioguideThe city canal cuts through the park ring at walking pace. Best done early, when the light is still low over the water.
03Lunch in the hangarsLatvian food tasting tour at Riga Central marketFive Zeppelin sheds full of smoked fish, black bread and grey peas. Come hungry and let somebody else do the ordering.
04The long day south2 countries! Hill of Crosses, Rundale Palace and Bauska castleRastrelli’s palace at Rundāle, Bauska’s castle, and over the Lithuanian border to the Hill of Crosses. Twelve hours, one minibus.
Riga is the base. Everything else is a morning’s drive.
A UNESCO old town, a river valley with three castles in it, a Baroque palace on the Lithuanian road, raised bog you cross on planks, and twenty miles of white sand at the end of a suburban train line.
Palace, river valley or bog: pick one and go.
Three kinds of day leave Riga in the morning and are back by evening. What each one costs to join, and what you actually see.
Half of Latvia is forest, and a good part of the rest is bog.
Boardwalks over the Great Ķemeri Bog at sunrise, when the pools still hold mist. The Gauja running red through sandstone under Turaida. Elk, cranes and a lot of pine. None of it is far: the furthest of these leaves Riga after breakfast and is back for dinner.
The days out more travellers take than anything else here.
All 123 Latvia tour reviews →Nine tours out of ten on this site leave from Riga. These are the ones that fill up first, and what each one costs to join.
1
Riga Old Town walking tour
Review of Riga’s budget-friendly Old Town walking tour, with historic sights, engaging guides, practical tips, group size, and honest value advice.
From · $18
Read our review →
2
Latvian food tasting tour at Riga Central market
from $44
3
2 countries! Hill of Crosses, Rundale Palace and Bauska castle
from $157
4
Discover Riga Bike Tour
from $47
5
Hill of Crosses & Jelgava Highlights
from $54
6
Riga Gun Range: shooting with Winchester, Glock17, & Kalashnikov
from $66
7
Best of Riga Walking Tour – Highlights and Hidden Gems
from $154
8
Riga Old Town Walking Tour in a Small Group
from $22
What a day out of Riga actually costs.
The city itself is cheap. The distance is what you pay for, and the ladder below shows how much.
Old Town walks, the canal boat, the market food tour and most of what happens inside the ring road.
- 1Riga Old Town walking tourfrom $18
- 2Latvian food tasting tour at Riga Central marketfrom $44
- 3Discover Riga Bike Tourfrom $47
The full days out: the palace run, Sigulda and Turaida, the bog at sunrise, the Hill of Crosses.
Private drivers, the husky teams and the two-country days that start before it gets light.
Riga is small enough to walk and strange enough to need a guide.
Three hours covers the guild houses, the Freedom Monument and the Jugendstil streets north of the park, with the Soviet decades filled in where they happened. The centre is flat, compact and best done before lunch.
- 1Riga Old Town walking tourfrom $18
- 2Best of Riga Walking Tour – Highlights and Hidden Gemsfrom $154
- 3Riga Art Nouveau walking tourfrom $36
Three things Latvia has that its neighbours do not.
Old towns and beaches run the length of the Baltic coast. A third of a capital built in Jugendstil, a palace by the man who built the Winter Palace, and a raised bog you can walk into at dawn do not.
Riga’s Jugendstil streets
Roughly a third of central Riga went up in Art Nouveau between 1899 and 1914, more than anywhere else in Europe. The showpiece is Alberta iela, where Mikhail Eisenstein loaded six facades with screaming masks, sphinxes and peacocks. The quieter perpendicular style a few streets over is the local invention, and the one Latvians will tell you actually matters.
- 1Riga Art Nouveau walking tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.0 · 27 reviews
- 2Old Town And Art Nouveau Walking Tour Of Riga★★★★★★★★★★ 4.0 · 15 reviews
- 3Small Group Art Nouveau walking tour 2h★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 6 reviews
Rundāle Palace
Bartolomeo Rastrelli built this for the Duke of Courland before he was called to St Petersburg to build the Winter Palace, and the ceilings show it. The state rooms were restored over forty years; the formal garden behind them is a French parterre laid out to the original plan. Ninety minutes south of Riga, on the road to the Lithuanian border.
- 1Private Full-Day Trip to Hill of Crosses, Rundale Palace & Bauska★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 36 reviews
- 2Hill of Crosses & Rundale Palace Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 18 reviews
- 3Full-Day Rundale Palace Tour from Riga★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 8 reviews
In December it gets dark at four, and Riga carries on regardless.
Midwinter here gives you about six hours of usable light, and the bog boardwalks are frozen or under snow. The answer is the same one Latvians use: keep the day short and indoors, put the walking either side of lunch, and let the dark do what it likes.
- 1Riga Old Town walking tourfrom $18
- 2Latvian food tasting tour at Riga Central marketfrom $44
- 3Pub Crawl in Rigafrom $36
Four Latvian days that will not wait for you.
Most of Riga can be arranged over breakfast. These four run on snow, sunrise, border traffic and somebody else’s opening hours.
- 01Husky Dog Sledding Tour From RigaSled teams run on snow, so the season is short and entirely at the weather’s discretion. When it comes, the dates go quickly.
- 02Sunrise at Kemeri National park + JurmalaSunrise over the bog means a pickup in the dark, and in June that is before half past four. Small groups, fixed departure.
- 032 countries! Hill of Crosses, Rundale Palace and Bauska castleIt is a four-hour drive each way and the site is over the border in Lithuania. This is a whole day committed, not an afternoon.
- 04Group Day trip to Rundale Palace, Hill of Crosses & Bauska CastleThe palace keeps its own opening times and closes rooms out of season. The garden is a summer proposition.
Riga, and everywhere a day trip reaches from it
Riga first, then the palace, the valley and the sea.
Riga Old Town
Alberta iela
Rundāle
Sigulda
JūrmalaFreshly reviewed, Riga and beyond.
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